Orienteering

By Stephen Greenblatt

Published: November 15, 1998

A YOUNG, impressionable Scottish woman, shortly after arriving in China in 1859, sends home an account of a boat trip she has taken on the Wusong River:

''On each side hung weeping willows, dropping their bending branches into the limpid stream. Back from the river were numerous fields waving with golden corn, and many a neat farmhouse peeped out amid a very luxuriance of trees. We were now nearing a beautifully arched bridge, green with flowering creepers. . . . On the top of a pretty green hill stood a time-worn pagoda, its numberless corners and juttings, edged with bronze and brass, catching a glow from the morning rays, and glittering in the fair sunlight.''

She is no doubt describing exactly what she saw, but she is also, of course, describing the wallpaper and porcelains and delicately figured boxes that had been the rage in Europe since the 18th century and have remained a staple of interior decoration ever since. When I was a child, I gazed at the same scenes on the walls of my parents' house in suburban Boston, and when I went to China in the 1980's, I reached for my camera to photograph certain landscapes because they looked, well, so much like China -- which is to say, so much like that wallpaper. No doubt I was careful to exclude from my snapshots whatever did not fit.

Jonathan D. Spence's wonderful new book, ''The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds,'' is about the history of these ''sightings,'' as he calls them, the numerous glimpses of a country that has fascinated and on occasion obsessed Western observers since the publication of Marco Polo's ''Travels'' in the late 13th century. My own childhood store of China sightings included more than chinoiserie: I was intrigued by Charles Finney's surreal novel ''The Circus of Dr. Lao'' and, at a younger age, terrified by the devilish cunning of Sax Rohmer's villain, Dr. Fu-Manchu. These purveyors of exotic stereotypes find their place in Spence's wide-ranging essays, which are based on a series of lectures first given at Yale University in the spring of 1996. They are joined by an enormous cast of missionaries, soldiers, traders, scholars, satirists, philosophers, linguists, poets, playwrights, painters, diplomats, scientists, adventurers, spies, visionaries, politicians and picture-taking tourists. As he moves through seven centuries of encounters, Spence makes time for figures as various as Jane Austen and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bret Harte and Henry Kissinger.

Is there an overarching order to these multifarious perspectives? Spence thinks not, and consequently his book, loosely organized in chronological order, does not offer any theory of the West's long encounter with China or any general account of the structure of its representations. The very term ''sighting,'' drawn from navigation and exploration, connotes something fleeting, intermittent and partial, sufficient perhaps to get one's bearings or even, in gunnery, to get off an accurate shot, but not nearly enough to take in the whole. An extreme example, too phantasmic to merit more than a brief mention, is Columbus's glimpse in 1492 of what he thought was China.

But Columbus was carrying with him an immensely influential account of China that Spence does discuss at some length, that of the Venetian Marco Polo. Though Polo, who claimed to have lived in China for 17 years, does not mention tea or Chinese calligraphy or the bound feet of the women, his work has enough detail to bear witness to a contact that is more than imaginary. Spence suggests that the weird omissions may be explained by the possibility that Polo's book was designed ''in part as a commentary on his own native city, as much as an accurate representation of life in China.'' This suggestion corresponds to a scene in Italo Calvino's haunting 1972 fantasy, ''Invisible Cities,'' discussed in one of Spence's later chapters, in which the Khan complains to his foreign visitor that he has never described the place he has come from:

'' 'There is still one of which you never speak.'

''Marco Polo bowed his head.

'' 'Venice,' the Khan said.

''Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'

''The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'

''And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.' ''

Much in Spence's book bears out this perception, often intensifying its irony: again and again, gifted observers strain to capture the essence of what seems to them the radically and irreducibly alien, only to construct displaced accounts of their own existence. The long, twisting road through the realm of the exotic often seems to lead back home. Small wonder that along with Calvino's ''Invisible Cities,'' the ''esthetically most perfect fictions about China,'' according to Spence, are two claustrophobic masterpieces, ''The Garden of Forking Paths,'' by Jorge Luis Borges, and ''The Great Wall of China,'' by Franz Kafka.